Ep 12 ｜ Pierre Poilievre ｜ Holding Trudeau to account
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
175.12973
Summary
When Canadians began to learn about the damage that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had done during his time, racking up half a trillion dollars in debt, handing out the doomed $900 million We Charity contract, and the mysterious case of 20,000 missing infrastructure projects, Trudeau shut down the investigations by proroguing Parliament. On today's episode of the True North Speaker Series, I sit down with one of the few figures in Canada willing to challenge our Prime Minister and hold him accountable for his scandalous ethics violations and disastrous fiscal policies that put our entire economy at risk.
Transcript
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I think he said to himself, I can do anything I want, you know, no one questions anything.
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It seems that the normal parliamentary accountability mechanisms are obliterated.
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So I think the group of them around Trudeau said, we now have unfettered access to the
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public purse with no scrutiny, and anybody who asks us a question about it will simply
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accuse them of nasty partisanship in the middle of a pandemic, and we'll assert our pure motives
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That's what I think, that's where I think their headspace was.
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And frankly, I think if the media had been doing its job, he probably would have been
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on his toes and he probably wouldn't have been so sloppy in this corruption.
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How can Canadians hold the minority liberal government to account?
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shut down Parliament just as he shut down the economy in response
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to COVID-19, choosing instead to hold daily press conferences with hand-selected friendly
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There was no oversight, no accountability, and no transparency, just daily propaganda sessions
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with liberal journalists lobbying softball questions at their favorite liberal celebrity.
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Can you describe specifically what your self-isolation means both for you and your family and your
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What does self-isolation actually mean for your family?
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And what are you telling your children about the heightened sense of concern in the country?
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And also, how are you explaining some of the political decisions that you're making?
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Okay, that is the Prime Minister of Canada on this Tuesday morning, and I'll just say what
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everyone is thinking before we get into the meat of what he said.
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When Canadians began to learn about the damage that Trudeau had done during his time,
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racking up half a trillion dollars in debt, handing out the doomed $900 million We Charity
00:01:51.640
contract, and the mysterious case of 20,000 missing infrastructure projects, Trudeau shut
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down the investigations by proroguing Parliament.
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On today's episode of the True North Speaker series, I sit down with one of the few figures
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in Canada willing to challenge our Prime Minister and hold him accountable for his scandalous
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ethics violations and the disastrous fiscal policies that put our entire economy, our
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Pierre Polyev is the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Ottawa-based riding of Carleton,
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Polyev serves as the Conservative Party's finance critic, and he was instrumental in drawing out
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new information and exposing the many contradictions and changing narrative Trudeau offered during
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the We Scam testimonies. I really enjoyed watching him hold Trudeau directly accountable during his
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Parliamentary Committee hearings, and I really enjoyed sitting down with Pierre to talk about
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all of the problems facing Ottawa, and how a Conservative government would offer a better vision for Canada.
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I hope you enjoy our conversation. Let me know what you think in the comments section,
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and please share this video with friends and like-minded Canadians.
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Pierre, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for coming on to the Speaker Series. It's great to
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Well, so before we get into all of the politics and everything that's going on in Ottawa these days,
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I want to talk a little bit about you and your background. So you are a Ottawa area MP. You've been
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representing the people of Nepean for, what, 15 years now? Since 2004, and it was Nepean-Carlton. I
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unfortunately lost Nepean in the redistribution, so I'm now on the Carlton area, which is sort of
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southwest Ottawa. Okay, interesting. And but before that, you are from Alberta, which I was just reading
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your background, your history. It seems like you really cut your teeth in Alberta politics.
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You were just mentioning off camera that you work for the Byfields, who were the founders of the
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Alberta Report. So why don't you tell us about young Pierre in the early days, working in politics?
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Well, when I was a teenager, I went to a few meetings for Ralph Klein's Progressive Conservatives
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and Preston Manning's Reformers, and met Preston Manning when I was 16 years old. He represented my
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southwest Calgary neighbourhood in Parliament, and got an intern working for a local Calgary MP when I was
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16 or 17 years old, and made 600 bucks a month. And it was an hour and a half bus ride, both each way.
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So that was how I started off in politics. It was not glamorous, but I was thrilled at that age to get
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involved. I then became Jason Kenney's intern when I was 18 or 19 years old. And he was one of my great
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mentors. When I was in my early 20s, I moved to Ottawa to work for Stockwell Day. And not long after that, I
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decided to take a crazy gamble and run for a Conservative nomination for the newly merged party in an Ottawa seat that we
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hadn't won since 1984. And I've been elected six times since.
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So tell us a little bit about the riding that you represent, because I think a lot of people in Western
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Canada, you know, they think of Ottawa as a very left-wing kind of government town. And yet you seem to
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represent a Conservative stronghold. So tell us a little bit about the riding that you represent.
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Well, it is basically south of the airport, and then it goes west all the way to where the Ottawa
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Senators Stadium is on the 417 Highway. I'm going to estimate about 75% of my residents are suburban,
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and about 25% are village or semi-rural. All of my riding is in the city of Ottawa. There are a lot of
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government workers, a fair amount of high-tech employment as well. There is a small farming
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population that sort of shrinks a little bit each year, unfortunately. But, you know, it had not
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been Conservative since 1984. The Conservatives had lost it in 88, 93, 97, 2000, before I won it in 2004.
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So it can be a bit of a swing riding. It's gone both ways. And right now, it's the only blue
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riding on the federal map in the city of Ottawa. We've got seven Liberals and one Conservative. So
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I'm the chair of the Ottawa Conservative Caucus. Well, good for you. I mean, I think that the
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Conservatives definitely have their work cut out for them in Ontario in general. I think that's one
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of the other questions that I wanted to ask you is that it really feels like the country is divided.
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I saw some polling that came out last week that basically showed that the Liberals are more
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favourable everywhere west of Ontario and everywhere, or sorry, everywhere east of Ontario and everywhere
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west, the Conservatives are up considerably. And there seems to be that divide. So, you know,
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for Western Canadians watching this podcast here, what is it that Western Canadians don't know or don't
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Well, you know, I'm in a unique position because my riding is in Ottawa, which is the nation's capital,
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and it's right on the border with Quebec. So I, you know, from where I'm sitting in my basement here,
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I've got five provinces west of me, five provinces east of me. And it gives me a bit of an insight into
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both sides. You know, I think that the differences are not as great as they seem. We have right now is an
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extremely divisive prime minister. You know, we've had, we have a conservative provincial government in
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Ontario, just like people do in Alberta and Saskatchewan. So at a provincial level, we're, you know, pretty much
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have the same governing philosophy in charge and victorious in this provinces as, you know, the
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Western prairie provinces do. But the difference is that we have a prime minister who's decided to
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mercilessly wage economic warfare against Alberta, Saskatchewan, parts of northern and interior British
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Columbia with his hostility to the resource sector. So in Ontario, the big population,
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centers, Toronto, Ottawa, et cetera, are not directly resource driven economies. They haven't felt the
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brunt yet of that war. They will. I mean, look, Toronto's financial sector has made billions of
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dollars investing, right, rightly in the energy sector. So Torontonians will feel the pain if this
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idiocy goes on. Ottawa residents will feel the pain as well, because of course, the public service
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relies on the tax revenues that the resource sector has paid so consistently over so many decades.
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So the whole country will ultimately suffer from this anti-resource agenda. But Albertans and
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Saskatchewanians are just the first to feel it and thus the first to be justifiably angry about it.
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You know, I read a lot of the sort of Laurentian elite commentary in the major newspapers. And it
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seems like the consensus is basically that, you know, the oil sands are bad for the environment,
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and it's just inevitable that we have to phase them out. And that's just the role of the federal
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government. And also that a government cannot win power. They cannot get votes in specifically Quebec,
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but also Ontario, without, you know, a green agenda and a very ambitious sort of green environmentalist
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plan. Do you accept that premise? Or what do you make of the elites that say that?
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Well, they're not talking to ordinary people, I can say in my riding, I overtly campaign in favor of
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pipelines, the Energy East pipeline was going to run right through my riding. And I was happy to support it
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from the very beginning. In fact, my liberal opponent tried to pretend he was for pipelines as well,
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because he knew that that's where the population was. Everyday people understand that pipelines make
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sense. In fact, what a lot of conservatives miss is Trudeau doesn't overtly or publicly oppose
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pipelines. He does it in all of his actions. He pretends that he's trying to get them built.
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But in reality, he uses all the levers of the state to stop it from happening. So he wouldn't
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be doing that. Pipelines weren't popular. You look back at his statements in the House of Commons,
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he very rarely confesses his real opinion on pipelines. He always says, oh, we're trying to
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work together with all the different groups and make it happen. And we're going through all the steps
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and gosh, golly, darn, I'm trying so hard. It just doesn't seem to work out. Meanwhile, he's using all of
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the bureaucratic machinery to stop it from occurring. But my point here is the population
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overwhelmingly supports pipelines in every region. There's even strong support in Quebec for pipelines.
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We know that there's a $14 billion natural gas pipeline and liquefaction project that awaits
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federal approval in the SAG name, for which there's overwhelming support by the Quebec government.
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So there is public support everywhere. And in fact, the province that was most devastated to learn
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that the Energy East project was killed was actually not Alberta or Saskatchewan, though they
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were justifiably outraged. It was New Brunswick because New Brunswickers were going to refine
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all of that Western petroleum had the pipeline gone ahead. A million barrels a day would have arrived
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from Alberta in New Brunswick. So we have national support for pipelines. Where we have failed is in
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properly exposing the fact that there is a single obstacle to pipelines in this country.
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That's a really interesting point. And I hadn't really thought of it. But now that I do, you know,
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when you're looking for examples of how the liberals oppose pipelines, it's usually like
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something that Gerald Butts said like 15 years ago, or something that Trudeau said sort of sneakily
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in a French language debate that they don't sort of overtly come out. And I recall even at the sort of
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beginning, they sort of beat their chest and said, look, we've actually had more pipelines of proof
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than the Harper government, which wasn't true. But that was sort of the line that the liberals took.
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But it does seem like there is a shift going on. We saw it with Chrystia Freeland in her sort of first
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press conference as finance minister, stating that the regrowth or the recreation of the economy after
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the COVID lockdowns here was going to be built on green, you know, plans and schemes. And there's
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been a lot of speculation about what's to come in the upcoming throne speech. So do you think that
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that perhaps the liberals are taking that shift, that they're going to do a sort of far left shift as
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what is sort of being implied in the media these days?
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Yes, I expect a radical new experiment. Gerald Butts, who effectively is running the government,
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put together a group of people to write a report on what the post-COVID Canadian economy should look
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like. And surprise, surprise, it came up with a $49.9 billion green plan. I love how it was $49.9 billion.
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You know, it's kind of like, you know, when you're buying a t-shirt at the store, they don't want to
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charge you $50, they charge you $49.99. So that you think it's a bargain. And, you know, for the very,
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very low time, a low price with this limited time offer, if you just call this 1-800 number,
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Gerald will sell you a green economy for $49 billion. But, you know, I can tell you the first
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thing is, if you are a liberal insider, you are going to get fabulously wealthy off of this. There
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will be many millionaires, maybe even a few billionaires that will result from this plan if
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it goes ahead. There'll be subsidies for phony renewable programs, fake windmill projects, fake
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solar projects that produce very little electricity. There'll be all kinds of funky new science fiction
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schemes that don't actually produce energy or output, but that are dressed up with all the
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right public relations. Basically, you know, if you want to sell a pig in Ottawa over the next
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several months, paint it green and bring it to Ottawa and Justin Trudeau will buy it with Canadian
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tax dollars. We saw, we've seen this before, of course, in Ontario, where they had a Green Energy Act
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and they were paying $0.90 a kilowatt hour for something that was worth $0.03. So you can imagine
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going to a grocery store and paying $0.90 for an item that's worth $0.03. Well, obviously, you're going
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to bankrupt yourself pretty quickly. And the result was it doubled electricity prices. It created something
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that the Ontario Association of Food Banks called energy poverty, a phenomenon where poor working class
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people were literally walking into the food bank with their power bill and saying, I can't keep the
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lights on and feed myself. So I'm going to have to come here for some canned goods. And meanwhile,
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well-connected liberal insiders managed to land these monstrous contracts. So you have millionaires
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on Bay Street making a fortune off of little old ladies who can't afford to turn the lights on in the
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morning. And this will happen on a grand scale if the Liberals go ahead with the schemes they've been
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speculating and hinting at in the media over the last several months. You know, it's wild to me,
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Pierre, that after living through the Green Energy Act and living through McGinty and Wynn and what
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happened, I mean, I remember there were news stories every week of someone's energy bill where it was
00:16:20.300
like $1,200 a month and, you know, there was just nothing that they could do. It was devastating to so
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many people across Ontario. And at the same time, we were seeing manufacturing plants shut down,
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the affordability, you know, not able to compete against, you know, like organizations like
00:16:38.200
manufacturing groups in the United States. How is it that we get ourselves this place where we're
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going through it again? Like, like, how is it that people in Ontario aren't like, hey, wait a minute,
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I recognize this. I've seen this before. Maybe we should be a little bit more cautious before we jump in
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onto this green, onto this green plant. I mean, I don't know if you can answer that question, but
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isn't there prevailing common sense that we've tried this? It failed massively. Let's not do it
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again. Well, the government is making the same mistake all over again. It reminds me of Kipling's
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poem in which he said that just as the dog returns to its vomit and the sow returns to her mire, the
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burned fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire. You know, we, we, you're right, we know,
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we know exactly how this ends. Uh, it ends in tears. Um, but it ends, uh, there's a very happy
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ending for a small group of highly influential people, uh, that will dress up their latest
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scheme as green and they will get monstrous grants and subsidies and handouts from various federal
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departments. Um, and I will all be called, uh, investments. Um, although in the real world,
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if you have a viable investment, you don't need a government handout because it will pay
00:17:56.420
for itself through its resulting revenues. Um, but, uh, again, it will, it will, uh, vaporize
00:18:02.120
tens of billions of dollars of hard earned money and make a very small group of privileged and
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well-connected people extremely rich. Well, that's, uh, that's the liberal story. I think in a nutshell,
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uh, we've been talking a little bit about how Trudeau alienates Western Canadians and, and how
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the country is very divided, but we've also seen a rise in separatism, the separatist sentiment
00:18:23.560
over in Quebec, uh, that, you know, the, the block Quebec law was basically decimated, um,
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and, and hardly won any seats whatsoever. In 2011, we saw the surge of the NDP over there. Uh, but,
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but in the last decade, they've sort of creeped back. So maybe you can help us understand, like,
00:18:39.700
what is it about Dustin Trudeau that has led to the rise of, of a separatist party in Quebec
00:18:45.040
as well? Well, I just think this, uh, centralized approach to governance, uh, where you've got a
00:18:52.700
big, powerful PMO in Ottawa that runs the economy and tries to run everybody's lives, uh, is a very
00:19:00.800
divisive force. Um, ironically, the, the purpose of it is to pull power inward, but what it does
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is to push people away. Um, because, you know, humans want to have control of their own lives.
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That's why Quebec has always been, uh, focused rightly so on protecting its own jurisdiction and
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keeping the federal government out of its affairs. So in a sense, I, I think there's a common cause
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between Albertans, uh, Western Canadians in general and Quebecers in the desire to keep the federal
00:19:33.720
government out of their backyard and let the, and, and, and allow people to, the, the, the popular
00:19:39.540
sovereignty, uh, over their own local and provincial decisions. Um, so again, in a heartbeat, I think
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it's, uh, it's a prime minister who, who, who is obsessed with controlling people's lives. And there's
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a similar backlash in Quebec to the kind that we witness, uh, in other parts of the country.
00:19:56.760
It's interesting. Okay. Let's, let's walk through sort of Justin Trudeau's prime ministership. Um,
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because, you know, obviously he was sort of swept in, he's a famous guy. He had a famous last name,
00:20:08.120
a famous father, his father, you know, for, for all the criticism about him, uh, you know, he, he was a
00:20:14.080
socialist and he destroyed so much of the Canadian economy. Uh, but, but, but at least he was sort of an
00:20:19.440
accomplished individual. He was a lawyer, he was well-educated. He had, he had, you know, obviously thought a
00:20:25.900
lot about Canada and the kind of country that he wanted to lead. Justin Trudeau, not so much, uh,
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you know, he sort of came in on this sort of celebrity style, you know, famous guy, charismatic,
00:20:39.600
articulate or whatever. Uh, you know, what, what, what, what has the impact of his prime ministership
00:20:45.800
been? He, he's been in office for about five years now. Uh, you know, what, what has changed over
00:20:50.800
those five years? Well, you know, first of all, it's interesting observation with the left, you know,
00:20:55.520
the modern left is very elitist, um, and, uh, intellectually stuck up their whole, uh, their
00:21:02.640
whole kind of narrative is that they're smarter than everyone else. That's why they should be
00:21:06.220
running everyone else's life. Um, and they love to denigrate the intellect of conservatives. Um,
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you know, Oh, you, you must be a simpleton if you think that way. Uh, we're told, um, but
00:21:18.860
a knuckle, a knuckle dragging, uh, Neanderthal as, as Bill Morneau once said, right?
00:21:24.000
Right. Exactly. You're, you must not be very sophisticated, but then they elect this guy
00:21:27.800
who, you know, conclude the confuses decimal with decibel, who, uh, who has a, who is a gaffe
00:21:35.420
machine who accidentally admits that China's his, the dictatorship in China is his favorite
00:21:42.640
model of governance, who thinks budgets balance themselves, things that everyone agrees, uh, or,
00:21:48.020
or should agree are utterly ridiculous. And I think that the pathology here on the left is that
00:21:54.660
they'd say, look, you know, he might be a dummy, but he's our dumb. Um, and, um, and ultimately he's
00:22:01.380
not running the country. Uh, other people who share, uh, the agenda of the, of the far left are running
00:22:09.860
it for him. And he's simply a puppet, uh, to, to the Gerald Butts, uh, establishment. And so I think
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that's why he's been able to, the left, which is so intellectually pretentious, um, is happy to have
00:22:23.880
someone as unsophisticated, uh, as Mr. Trudeau is because they, they know that he's ultimately being
00:22:30.440
run, uh, by those who share the left wing agenda. Um, what is the result of this? Uh, it means that a
00:22:38.060
small group of people are getting richer and power, more powerful, uh, using the state as their
00:22:44.420
instrument. Um, and, uh, they have him, uh, fronting it all, a friendly face, um, a handsome, modern,
00:22:55.380
open looking fellow, um, is sitting at the front of this, this, this whole apparatus, but behind the
00:23:03.040
scenes, uh, a very well, um, a very sophisticated group of insiders is pulling all the levers and
00:23:09.780
running the government to their own profit and to their own benefit and to everyone else's detriment.
00:23:14.900
Well, you, you sort of seeing that now with the, uh, you know, just another scandal. I mean,
00:23:19.400
it seems like scandal on top of scandal with this government, but the idea that the, uh, prime
00:23:24.080
minister's chief of staff's own husband was lobbying the government and ended up walking away with a
00:23:29.520
contract for $84 million or something that, that, that, that's sort of, you know, to, to, to the
00:23:35.060
Canadian out of work, who's lost their small business or something like that. You know, you
00:23:39.980
look at, you look at this sort of insider-ness of Ottawa and you kind of just scratch your head and
00:23:45.060
wonder like, you know, what, what, what is this all for? But to me, Pierre, the thing that I worry
00:23:50.540
about, and I honestly don't know what the answer to this question is, is you look at the deficit.
00:23:54.240
I mean, I, I, I, I, someone who, uh, you know, very opposed running deficits. I think government
00:23:59.480
should be run like businesses or like households. And that the idea of even a modest $10 billion
00:24:04.760
deficit isn't good for the country, that, that, that, that, that even though interest rates are low,
00:24:09.480
you know, we're still paying about 10% of, of total revenue that the government collects just to,
00:24:14.900
you know, service the debt and, and to bondholders. Uh, the, the idea of, of, of, of a $400
00:24:21.120
billion deficit is quite frankly, terrifying. And I have no idea how any government would erase that
00:24:28.140
deficit, let alone work towards paying off a trillion dollar debt, uh, that, that the surely
00:24:33.300
will get dumped on the, on the shoulders of our children and our grandchildren. Uh,
00:24:39.440
how is Justin Trudeau even going to continue governing in this fashion? I mean, he's talking
00:24:44.820
about continuing to have, to have a 10% of, of GDP, uh, deficit rate. Uh, you know, how, how is it
00:24:52.580
even structurally fiscally possible without a massive increase in taxes? Or is, is there something
00:24:58.720
like that coming? Is there, is there a wealth tax coming? Is there a massive increase in taxes? I mean,
00:25:03.960
the top tax rate in Ontario is already over 50%. It's hard to imagine how much higher you can go,
00:25:09.260
but I, I, I just, I just wonder, you know, for you as an elected official and someone who is in,
00:25:14.360
in government, I mean, you're opposition, but you're still representing Canadians. You know,
00:25:19.160
what do you, what do you tell people about the, the, the, the fiscal situation in Canada right now?
00:25:25.540
Well, let me just share some, some basic facts that are actually quite startling. So the government
00:25:32.400
will say, well, we've got a crisis. The COVID shutdown is the reason we have this monstrous deficit. So
00:25:37.300
let's compare the deficit to other crises, uh, in world war one, our debt, our deficit to GDP
00:25:45.280
was 9%. In the great depression, it was about 6%. In the great recession of 2008, nine,
00:25:59.220
it was about three and a half percent right now. Our deficit sits at around 17% GDP. So in other
00:26:07.280
words, our deficit as a share of our GDP. So this is automatically adjusted for inflation and for
00:26:12.940
the changed size of our economy. Our deficit is now, uh, twice what it was in world war one.
00:26:20.700
It is, uh, approximately six times what it was during the great global recession. Uh, it is three
00:26:29.840
times higher than it was at its peak in 1932 in the great depression. The only time we've ever had a
00:26:36.620
deficit this big was back in 1943 when we had a 23% of GDP deficit. And that was of course, right smack
00:26:44.520
in the middle of world war two. But the difference there, by the way, is that by 1947, Canada was
00:26:51.340
running monstrous surpluses. Our soldiers came home with all of the wages they had earned and then
00:26:57.560
weren't allowed to spend. And they spent it in the economy and they bought homes and they built
00:27:02.220
a great generation, uh, uh, thereafter. And they gave birth to the baby boomers, et cetera. And we
00:27:08.000
had this surge of, uh, of revenue and the government didn't spend it. In fact, spending went down.
00:27:14.000
And so we paid off huge amounts of debt. We had surpluses of 5% of GDP in 1947, which would be like,
00:27:21.500
imagine today if we had $120 billion surplus, that's how big their surpluses were in the post-war
00:27:27.580
period. So yet people say, the liberals say, Oh yeah, but in the war, the deficits were a little
00:27:32.000
bit bigger. Yes, but they paid them off quickly. As soon as the crisis was over, they quickly went
00:27:38.060
back into surplus, paid it off. And we had another 30 years of prosperity as a result. So I'm just
00:27:44.460
giving that as a perspective. Um, so right now our debts that our debt, our debt now moved to the debt
00:27:50.760
is, um, it's, it's well over a trillion dollars. We've gone from a debt that was a third of our
00:27:57.180
economy, 30% of GDP to 50% in just, uh, six months. So 30% of GDP to 50% of GDP in six months to put
00:28:08.700
that in perspective. We hit a debt wall in Canada in 1996, where the world wouldn't lend us any money
00:28:15.140
anymore. And it was basically a financial collapse. The G the IMF put up warnings about us. The, the
00:28:21.400
wall street journal called us a fiscal bad third world fiscal basket case, but that happened when
00:28:26.320
the debt to GDP ratio was 66.6%. So we've eliminated more than half of the buffer between where, between
00:28:35.820
our previous debt level and the maximum debt we can sustain as a government. We've eliminated more
00:28:42.360
than half of that buffer in six months. So I know I'm throwing a lot of information out, but, but I
00:28:48.040
just want to give a perspective on how truly massive these deficits are. They are not, they, they are
00:28:54.180
orders of magnitude bigger, many orders of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen outside of the
00:28:59.980
world war II period before or after. So what's going to happen? I believe Trudeau will try to get a
00:29:05.780
majority. And once he does that, there'll be massive tax increases. You ask what a wealth tax,
00:29:10.480
that's nothing. The wealth tax raises $6 billion, according to the parliamentary budget officer.
00:29:16.560
They might claim that that's their big solution. We've got a $380 billion deficit. You're not going
00:29:21.980
to get rid of that with a $6 billion tax. They would need massive new, uh, income tax, uh, GST
00:29:29.720
increases, business tax increases, increases in every tax you pay in order to keep spending like
00:29:36.900
this. There is no mathematical way to go on doing what we're doing. Uh, and if, and the
00:29:43.500
parliamentary budget officer says, so you don't, you don't just have to believe the conservative
00:29:46.740
finance clinic. Just the other day, the parliamentary budget officer said, we've got one, maybe two years
00:29:53.200
like this before we collapse. Um, so, um, it is a crisis situation and, uh, we're the only party
00:30:01.440
that has foretold this problem and we're the only private party that can get the country out of it.
00:30:06.240
Well, it, you know, it's kind of interesting when you talked about the second world war, Pierre,
00:30:09.940
because the, the, the spending initiatives and the programs that the government would have
00:30:13.820
introduced at the time were by their very nature, temporary. You know, the idea was to go and fight
00:30:19.640
a war and stop the Nazis and protect freedom around the world. Uh, but, but what we saw with the,
00:30:25.440
with the great recession or the great, yeah, the great recession, 2008, 2009,
00:30:29.220
you know, the Harper government at least tried to make it so that the temp, the programs were
00:30:33.580
temporary, that the, that the stimulus spending that they introduced and some of the bailouts
00:30:37.740
were, were, were temporary in measure. I think that that's easier said than done. And, you know,
00:30:42.740
certainly what we saw in the United States was just a proliferation of bureaucracy. And that's
00:30:47.420
what tends to happen during these sort of so-called crises when government has to grow to fill the
00:30:52.820
need. So, you know, with, with the CERB, I mean, first of all, the, the numbers themselves are
00:30:57.860
incredible. I saw in the Globe and Mail last week that I think that a household income during COVID
00:31:03.220
fell by $21 billion, but during the same period, government transfers increased by $54 billion.
00:31:10.000
So Canadians might've hardly even noticed. Uh, they actually might've been better off
00:31:14.460
during COVID than they were working, you know, night and day to try to pay the bills. Uh, a lot of
00:31:20.740
people have suggested that perhaps it's time for the government to introduce some kind of a
00:31:25.440
universal basic income or to transition that CERB, uh, benefit over to a universal, you know,
00:31:31.540
it doesn't, it doesn't really sound like that's sustainable financially though. Uh, what is, is
00:31:35.940
your, is there a concern, uh, on the conservative side that a lot of the programs that Trudeau has
00:31:40.340
introduced are permanent? And if a conservative government were to win, that they would be
00:31:45.940
criticized for, you know, the, the same vicious line of attacks you get, oh, bringing in austerity
00:31:51.460
and cutting and, and, and, and all these kinds of, uh, accusations that we see over and over
00:31:58.260
Okay. No, there's a lot, a lot in your question. Let me start quickly with your comments on the
00:32:03.540
Harper era, uh, stimulus. So the economic action plan was worked out to about 2% of GDP and,
00:32:11.600
uh, we had a deficit, uh, of three and a half percent of GDP. So again, right now we're at 17%
00:32:18.240
of GDP in a deficit. So it was like, we're, we're, we're just talking orders of magnitude
00:32:23.420
difference, uh, um, six times bigger deficit in relative terms, again, adjusted for inflation
00:32:29.560
and the size of the economy. Secondly, we did lapse those programs. Every single stimulus
00:32:35.140
program we brought in during the great global recession, uh, ended in 2011 and we had real
00:32:41.780
reductions. No, not just real nominal reductions in spending in every single year that followed.
00:32:48.120
In 2012, 13, 14, and 15 federal government spending actually went down. And we did that
00:32:54.680
without, by the way, cutting healthcare or education, both of which went up. So it is
00:32:58.980
possible to manage down the cost of government and relieve taxpayers of their burdens. And
00:33:05.020
finally, one last point. We never once raised taxes in the entire tenure period. We were in
00:33:09.620
office. So all of these things are possible. Now on the, um, basic income. So we've had,
00:33:16.480
I've had the parliamentary budget officer cost out various models of a basic income and there
00:33:22.880
is no model that comes in below $73 billion a year. The cheapest model anyone has been able
00:33:30.980
to put forward was Kathleen Wynne's approach, which she did a basic income pilot project in
00:33:37.080
Ontario that would pay an individual $17,400 and a couple $24,000. Um, that would be 75% of the
00:33:47.280
poverty rate. Um, so, and it would be phased out at a rate of 50 cents for every dollar a person earned.
00:33:54.440
Um, and so that was the model that she designed. I said, Hey, parliamentary budget officer, if we did
00:34:00.000
this federally, how much would that cost? And he said that would be about $73 billion. So that,
00:34:05.740
that is a lot less generous than the serve by the way, which is $2,000 per person, uh, and 4,000
00:34:12.320
for a couple. So the, uh, the high end, we're looking at $200 billion or higher, uh, for, uh, a
00:34:20.300
program, um, of that nature. So that would be half of the typical budget of the government of
00:34:25.120
Canada. It would be five times what the federal government spends on healthcare transfers. It would
00:34:29.880
be 10 times what we spend on the armed forces. It would be, um, one last thing, it would be six
00:34:37.840
times what we collect in GST revenues. So, so there's no one out there that has any explanation
00:34:43.820
of how you pay for it. And the difference between this idea and so many, uh, liberal spending ideas
00:34:50.340
is most liberal spending schemes are undesirable. Um, this is mathematically impossible unless you're
00:34:58.160
prepared to eliminate, um, whole departments and programs and, uh, at multiple levels of
00:35:06.260
government to find the, the fiscal space to pay for it, which nobody is proposing by the
00:35:11.080
way, then there, it is mathematically impossible to pay for it. And, and I, I, interestingly, I
00:35:17.240
don't, I have not yet heard the liberals openly advocate for a basic income. So it is possible
00:35:23.820
that someone at finance sat them down with a calculator and very slowly walked them through
00:35:28.860
what, what I just, what I just mentioned. Um, but listen, every day I'm shocked. Like
00:35:35.820
I, I, I, I always know, I always knew I was more fiscally conserved than these guys are, but every
00:35:41.540
day it blows me away. The things, the amounts of money they're willing to spend and the things
00:35:46.780
they're willing to spend on. So nothing would surprise me. Well, it's funny because, you know,
00:35:53.340
we just had Bill Morneau as a finance minister for five years. And during that time, you know,
00:35:59.040
we saw a bunch of reckless spending decisions. We saw growth of debt, growth of deficits. Uh,
00:36:04.280
we saw it, like I mentioned, the top, uh, income tax rate in Ontario go above 50%. Uh, but now as soon
00:36:10.860
as he's gone, all of a sudden it's like, he's being remembered as this like fiscally conservative blue
00:36:16.140
liberal. It's like, I don't, I don't really remember seeing that very much, uh, while he
00:36:19.980
was doing, doing the job up here, you, you mentioned that you think that, uh, Justin Trudeau
00:36:24.320
is going to try to get a majority government. Do you think with this throne speech coming
00:36:28.560
up here that we are headed into election season? Cause it does feel like Trudeau is doing a lot
00:36:34.260
of sort of election style announcements and it almost seems like they're kicking into a election
00:36:39.500
mode here. What do you think? I think he needs an election and there are, uh, I will say
00:36:45.660
two reasons why he needs an election quickly. One, he needs an election before the money runs out.
00:36:52.380
Um, as I mentioned, the debt levels and the spending levels are unsustainable. The parliamentary
00:36:58.380
budget officer says he's got one, maybe two years. So he needs the election done before the financial
00:37:04.180
collapse occurs so that, uh, he can, he can run on this fairy tale that money will continue to fall
00:37:10.780
out of the sky and everything's free and we'll just put it on the credit card and we won't ever
00:37:15.660
repay that credit card. Um, and he thinks he can swindle an election victory off of that fantasy one
00:37:22.540
last time. And then the brutal hard truth will kick in a year and a half later, but he won't care
00:37:27.580
because he'll have a majority. So that's the first reason. Second reason he needs an election
00:37:33.260
is because there are some very ugly truths that are being, that he's hiding that will become known
00:37:40.700
soon. Uh, one, uh, the ethics commissioner, the lobbying commissioner, potentially the RCMP
00:37:47.180
and the auditor general are all investigating the we scandal. Um, that will not only produce guilty
00:37:53.180
verdicts and in the case of the lobbying commissioner, outreach criminal charges in some cases, uh, for
00:37:59.580
certain people, but, uh, it will also produce reports that will show what went on behind the
00:38:05.900
scenes. Uh, and I'm sure there's much, there, there's much more there than we know of. Uh,
00:38:10.620
the commissioner has the power to call documents and people and it's obstruction of justice to lie
00:38:16.780
to the commissioner. Um, so that's going to come out. There's a, an investigation into the
00:38:23.820
prime minister's chief of staff spouse lobbying for government contract,
00:38:28.620
government contracts and subsidies, uh, lobbying his spouse's office. Um, that is likely to be
00:38:35.260
under investigation, at least by the lobbying commissioner. Um, finally, uh, the auditor general
00:38:41.740
is investigating, uh, a, a, what I think is a brewing scandal that no one has noticed, which is that
00:38:47.500
there are 20,000 missing infrastructure projects. So the government has said, we have funded 52,000
00:38:53.740
infrastructure projects. And I said, okay, great. What, give us a list. So they gave us a list with
00:38:58.940
32,000. So we have said, so where's the rest of it? And they say, oh, we can't tell you, you know,
00:39:05.820
so these are secretive. It's impossible to build an infrastructure project in secret. They're big,
00:39:11.500
loud, noisy affairs. There's guys in hard hats and machines thumping away. You know, if there's an
00:39:17.660
infrastructure project happening, it's not a secret, right? And there would be a list of where,
00:39:21.980
when, how much it costs to build these projects. Um, but they don't have the list,
00:39:27.100
which means that the money went somewhere it shouldn't have. And the auditor general is
00:39:30.700
looking into exactly that. And I think that report will come out in late spring.
00:39:35.180
Long story short, Trudeau needs an election out of the way before any of this stuff comes out.
00:39:40.380
And that's why I think he's going to push for one in the fall.
00:39:43.340
So you said that that report's coming out late spring. What, why is it going to take so long?
00:39:47.500
That's the nature of, uh, auditor general examinations. Um, you know, they have to track
00:39:53.900
billions of dollars of spending. Um, the purported infrastructure spend is something like $9 billion a
00:40:01.420
year. And so the, the AG has to go through all the departments. These are spread out of all these
00:40:08.380
departments in Ottawa. They're also involving the provinces and the municipalities. So it just takes a
00:40:14.140
long time, by the way, the auditor general is underfunded. Um, the AG's office is short about
00:40:20.220
$11 million. So one thing Trudeau doesn't want to spend money on is auditors. It's yes to everything
00:40:26.620
else. He doesn't, you know, doesn't care who you are or what you're asking for money for it.
00:40:30.140
The answer is always yes, unless you're an auditor, in which case the answer is a firm no.
00:40:34.460
The only person in Ottawa who hears that, no. Uh, he believes in austerity for one office,
00:40:42.860
the auditor general. Well, I, okay. So let's, let's talk about the Wii scandal. Cause I'm,
00:40:48.620
we all watched it, uh, with, with a lot of interest. I feel like you're, you're right,
00:40:52.540
that there was a lot of liberal MPs and people that were testifying sort of alluding to the fact
00:40:57.740
like, oh, you know, we were just working so hard and it was so crazy and we're just doing our best
00:41:02.460
to, to try to help Canadians during this difficult time, sort of setting up the idea that sure we
00:41:08.540
didn't do all the due diligence that we probably should have in, you know, shipping $400 billion
00:41:13.740
out the door in just a matter of a few months. But for, for, for people who maybe haven't been
00:41:19.100
glued to their, uh, computer screens, watching, uh, parliamentary committee testimonies all summer
00:41:24.940
appear, maybe you can just kind of give us a, a brief overview of, of the Wii scandal. So tell us
00:41:30.060
what happened, how did it happen and where are we now? Well, what we know now is that it,
00:41:36.460
in the early part of the pandemic, early April, uh, the Kielberger brothers, uh, began aggressively
00:41:43.340
pitching key decision makers in the cabinet, the staff and the bureaucracy on this idea of a social
00:41:52.300
entrepreneurship program. This was going to apparently teach young people how to be entrepreneurs,
00:42:00.060
in the social sector. And, you know, they, they went around the hill and no one was really interested.
00:42:07.420
Um, but then, and, and this was going to be a small program, you know, I think it was 20 or $30
00:42:11.660
million. Um, but little did they know that there was a much bigger price. Um, and so the government
00:42:18.300
said, well, we might not be interested in your social entrepreneurship program, but we've got this
00:42:22.380
way bigger initiative called a paid volunteer program. Of course, that's an oxymoron. Um,
00:42:29.980
if you're a volunteer, you're not paid. If you're paid, you're not a volunteer. Um, but, uh, you know,
00:42:34.700
Orwell warns that whenever there's an abusive language, there are other abuses at work. And so
00:42:41.500
anyway, he, uh, the, uh, we brothers say, great, forget about this stupid entrepreneur program we had
00:42:48.060
last week. We'll do a paid volunteer program instead. Uh, and, uh, you know, we were originally
00:42:54.460
trolled by the liberals that the whole thing was cooked up by a bunch of bureaucrats in a Gatineau
00:42:59.980
departmental building. But we learned later that no, no, no, no, it was not cooked up by them at all.
00:43:05.740
It was initiated by Bill Morneau, who had been on an illegal $41,000 vacation with the
00:43:12.860
Wee brothers. Uh, it was cooked up by Bardiff Chagher who had telephone conversations with
00:43:18.940
Mr. Kielberger and told him, uh, to put together a proposal on the subject. It was cooked up by,
00:43:25.820
there were two senior staff, uh, policy advisors in the PMO, one of whom Kielberger credits with having
00:43:34.380
played an important role in designing the whole initiative. So it was cooked up by politicians
00:43:40.300
and their staff. And it just so happens, this is the crux of the matter. It just so happens that this
00:43:45.660
is a prime minister whose family had received a half a million dollars from this group. So the group
00:43:52.780
pays the Trudeau family a half million and the Trudeau government pays them a half billion, which is a
00:43:57.660
phenomenal return on investment. They should really be advising Warren Buffett, uh, on how to get an ROI.
00:44:04.460
Because I don't think he's ever produced any kind of return like that. Um, and of course, um, so here
00:44:10.460
we are now, uh, the matter has been for parliamentary committees that have now been shut down due to
00:44:15.260
due to Trudeau's prorogation. But worry not, we're going to reconvene those studies. We're also going,
00:44:21.020
we also have investigations by the lobbying commissioner, the, the, the, uh, ethics commissioner,
00:44:27.740
and potentially the RCMP, though they never confirm what they're investigating.
00:44:32.300
The liberals have this weird ability. I mean, I remember during SNC-Lavalin, uh, Gerald Butts resigned
00:44:37.580
and presumably he resigned as a admission of some kind of guilt or responsibility. But during his
00:44:42.700
resignation, he sort of insisted that he had done nothing wrong. And lo and behold, a couple months,
00:44:46.860
he's back working for Trudeau again. This time around, we saw Bill, no Bill Morneau resign. Uh,
00:44:52.940
but he sort of inexplicably, he, he said they had nothing to do with this. We scandal that he was
00:44:58.380
at the center of it. He just happened to have wanted to go pursue, you know, an international,
00:45:04.140
uh, career with the OECD instead of leading, uh, the finances of a G7 country. Uh, so, so at this
00:45:12.940
point, has there been anyone who is, you know, taken responsibility on behalf of the liberals?
00:45:18.140
Is there anyone that's admitting blame or are they still insisting that they've done nothing wrong?
00:45:24.460
You know, Trudeau has admitted he should have refused himself, but I think that's a complete
00:45:29.100
distraction. It suggests that he was a passive player and that something was brought up to his
00:45:33.740
desk and that he should have got, got up from his desk and walked to the room. In fact, I think he
00:45:39.020
and his team were the, um, the ones who initiated it all. Uh, so, um, he's cleverly apologizing for
00:45:49.100
the smallest part of the offense while trying to, to distance himself from the biggest part,
00:45:55.580
which is that he and his staff actively participated to extend a half billion dollars to a group that
00:46:02.380
had paid his family a half a million dollars. It just sort of defies logic as to why they would
00:46:08.780
even want to get involved in this. It seems to me, as soon as the decision that the funding
00:46:14.380
proposal became public, it was, it was immediately a scandal. The media immediately said, well, wait a
00:46:19.660
minute, you know, all of these ties to liberals, all of these family ties to Trudeau and Morneau.
00:46:25.180
I mean, you just sort of wonder like who, who, who's running things at, at the PMO. Who's,
00:46:30.540
who's running things as a government where they wouldn't even acknowledge the, the appearance of
00:46:34.860
what would obviously be a conflict of interest in trying to ship, like you said, I think it was half,
00:46:40.060
half a billion dollars to, to it in, in, in, in money and then an additional hundred,
00:46:45.260
couple hundred million dollars to actually administer this program. So it was, it was 912
00:46:50.300
million dollars total. I mean, did, did they not see that this was going to be a scandal
00:46:55.660
No. And I'll tell you why. And the book of Proverbs could tell you why. Pride precedes
00:47:01.580
destruction. Remember, Justin Trudeau was the master of the universe, running the, running the
00:47:08.700
universe from his cottage, from his cottage front steps in April and May. And this is where I think
00:47:18.780
the media should apologize to Justin Trudeau because they filled his head with all this
00:47:24.620
hubris. They, they were going around Ottawa. It's hard to remember this now, but in April,
00:47:29.580
May, and even June, the media had basically taken the position that no one should be allowed to
00:47:34.620
criticize Justin Trudeau. Here we are in the middle of a pandemic to criticize him would be to be playing
00:47:39.820
politics and to be putting lives on the line. And anyone who criticizes Trudeau is effectively
00:47:47.420
committing treason and endangering public health. They beat up Andrew Scheer. They said, oh,
00:47:53.740
Scheer wants to bring back parliament. What the hell do we need parliament for? Don't we all realize
00:47:59.100
that now is the time to just gather around the footsteps of, of Rito cottage and let the prime
00:48:05.260
minister come out and bestow wisdom on us daily. And I was regularly attacked. I would go on Twitter
00:48:13.500
and I would tweet something critical and there would be this, these paradas in the, in the press
00:48:18.300
gallery would come at me and, you know, I'll look at him. He's gone off the deep end. He's Italian.
00:48:22.140
Everyone else is rallying around our prime minister now. And here you have this, this black sheep who's
00:48:27.180
out here, uh, standing all by himself. And, and, and, you know, I think he said to himself,
00:48:31.820
I can do anything I want, you know, he, no one questions anything. Um, there, it seems that the
00:48:38.860
normal parliamentary accountability mechanisms are, uh, obliterated. So I think the group of
00:48:45.420
them around Trudeau said, we, we, we now have unfettered access to the public purse with no
00:48:51.260
scrutiny. And anybody who asks us a question about it, we'll simply accuse them of nasty partisanship
00:48:56.780
in a, in the middle of a pandemic. And, uh, and we'll assert our pure motives and we'll do whatever
00:49:02.540
the hell we please. That's what I think that that's where I think their headspace was. And
00:49:06.700
frankly, I think if the, the media had been doing its job, he probably would have been on his toes
00:49:11.420
and he probably wouldn't have been so sloppy. Well, maybe, maybe the media is doing a service
00:49:16.700
to Canadians after all, then by letting him have his guard down. I, I, I totally remember that because
00:49:21.260
I remember a couple, uh, columns coming out of the Toronto star basically saying, why do we need
00:49:25.900
question period? Uh, the, the, the, the government gets held to account every morning by these
00:49:30.780
reporters asking questions. And it's like, you know, True North did an analysis of those questions
00:49:35.340
that were asked. More than half of them were coming from the CBC. You know, they were, they were positive
00:49:39.740
in nature. They weren't asking questions about, you know, and anything that was serious about
00:49:44.140
government. It was always like, you know, Hey, how was your weekend? How are you coping? Did you get a
00:49:48.700
haircut? You know, these kinds of questions. So, uh, what, one, one last question about the
00:49:53.900
Wiescat, it seems like a lot of times with these scandals that the coverup is worse than the crime.
00:49:58.940
And I think what we saw right before parliament was probed, uh, there was a document dump. So I
00:50:04.300
think you got 40 or 50,000 emails. Most of them were heavily redacted. And, and you made that point
00:50:09.580
that, you know, we, we don't really know what's in these documents, but of the things that weren't
00:50:13.580
redacted, the timeline kind of came into place and it seemed like there were some major contradictions
00:50:18.700
between what the liberals had said, uh, and, and what really happened, particularly your point
00:50:23.580
about how the civil service wasn't really the one recommending it. It seemed like it was more
00:50:27.260
something that was led by minister, uh, Chager, but you know, part, part of the issue is that,
00:50:33.660
you know, by the time Justin Trudeau came and testified, he kind of was giving a different answer
00:50:38.620
than he had been for the previous few weeks. All of a sudden he was telling us something new. And it's
00:50:43.980
like, well, you know, why is the prime minister saying new information now when this has been in
00:50:48.300
the press for a month? Do you think that the, that the, the liberals were sort of trying to be too
00:50:53.900
cute that if they had come out from the get go and just explain what would have happened, Canadians
00:50:57.900
would have forgiven them, but it was because of those sort of the evolution of the storyline and
00:51:02.300
the evolution of, you know, when did Justin Trudeau find out when did the civil service recommend
00:51:06.380
these, this, this contract that that's ultimately what's going to going to get them in trouble here?
00:51:11.340
Yeah. I think so. I mean, look, the, the story, the truth is ugly in this one. I mean,
00:51:17.020
whenever you have a prime minister's family getting paid a half a million dollars and then
00:51:21.980
he turns around and hands a half a billion to the group that paid them, uh, you've got a serious
00:51:27.820
scandal, uh, potentially a criminal one. So there's no doubt they had big trouble based on the facts,
00:51:34.060
but you're quite right. Um, covering up things that were ultimately going to come out has just made
00:51:39.580
it worse. You know, you look at a chugger. Um, she comes to our committee denies that she ever met
00:51:45.900
with, uh, or spoke with, with the Kiel burgers, uh, about the Canada student service grant. And it
00:51:52.140
turns out she did. Um, we have, uh, the prime minister saying his office wasn't involved in the
00:51:58.460
decision. Well, we have correspondence showing that two of his senior advisors were directly involved.
00:52:04.060
One of them helped design the very program that we're talking about. Um, you know, we have, uh,
00:52:09.500
Bill Morno's office, Bill Morno saying basically, oh, it had nothing to do with me. I was just, um,
00:52:15.580
the minister responsible, but it was all the bureaucrats. Well, now we know that by the
00:52:20.060
bureaucrats own internal correspondence that they said that, uh, he was, that the minister's office
00:52:25.420
was insisting on it and that they were quote besties, besties. His office was besties with the,
00:52:31.900
with the we brothers. Uh, and that's a quote, um, you know, the bureaucrats who are supposedly
00:52:37.980
enamored with this program called it a quote, shit show. That's a quote right out of the email
00:52:43.660
correspondence. Um, the, uh, they, you know, Trudeau said, oh, the bureaucrats told me there was no other
00:52:50.060
organization with the capacity to run this program except for we, well, we now have treasury board
00:52:56.080
secretary of bureaucrats who said they didn't believe we could run the program. So it just, all of these
00:53:01.620
lies that are so obviously contradictable for which there's documentary evidence. I don't even,
00:53:08.660
I don't know why they bothered telling all these lies. They should have just come out and said from
00:53:13.100
the get go, look, um, we got excited. We did something we shouldn't have. There was an obvious
00:53:19.220
conflict of interest. It was all our fault. Uh, you know, give us a good licking in the press for
00:53:25.900
a week and then we'll try to move on. That's, I think the better, it would have been the better
00:53:29.900
strategy. They still would have been in a lot of trouble. They would have been found guilty,
00:53:32.860
but at least there wouldn't be this whole series of lies that have been exposed little by little
00:53:39.320
each day. So that leads me to another thought that I have. And I hear from a lot of Canadians
00:53:45.520
about this. It seems like Justin Trudeau really is above the law. He acts like he's above the law.
00:53:50.640
He has this sort of arrogance that he is. He has repeated ethics violations. He repeatedly
00:53:56.140
gets told by the ethics commissioner that he has violated the conflict of interest act. And yet
00:54:02.680
there doesn't really seem to be any repercussions. You know, he has a slap on the wrist, a minor fine.
00:54:08.020
I mean, if, even if he is found guilty of violating, again, the conflict of interest act with this
00:54:15.060
weed scandal, you know, it will, it will lead to him actually losing his, his role as prime minister.
00:54:21.900
So what, what can the government do to hold Trudeau accountable? You know, is it creating another set
00:54:28.500
of laws? Is it, is there anything that can be done to actually stop an individual who is a repeat
00:54:34.600
offender of, of these acts that are designed to hold these politicians accountable?
00:54:40.800
Well, look, I was the parliamentary secretary who passed the accountability act. It was my job to take
00:54:47.240
it through committee and through the house of commons in 2006. So all of the laws we're talking
00:54:52.900
around right now, the lobbying act, the conflict of interest act, uh, they were all partly my creation.
00:54:59.660
And so I support them, but here's the thing is you can't, at the end of the day, you can't replace
00:55:05.500
the, uh, what Churchill called the, the mighty power of a little man walking into a little room with a
00:55:13.260
piece of paper and putting it in a little box. Uh, and that of course is the voter. Uh, the, the voter
00:55:19.060
has to decide that they're not going to put up with it anymore. Um, at the end of the day, you can have
00:55:24.840
all of the law enforcement bodies you want coming out and making findings of guilt, but if the voter is
00:55:31.160
not going to hold them accountable for it, then he's, he is, uh, has impunity. Um, there is a weird
00:55:39.420
psychology among the political class in Canada that Justin Trudeau is special for that. Yes,
00:55:46.580
of course, if any other junior candidate had worn blackface, they would have been not even been
00:55:51.960
allowed to run the party's ticket, let alone lead it. Um, that, uh, if anyone else had been found
00:55:58.100
guilty of trying to stop a criminal prosecution, they'd immediately have to resign from cabinet.
00:56:04.080
Many have resigned for much less, um, that there would be criminal charges, uh, and there should
00:56:10.780
have been criminal charges for taking a $200,000 vacation from someone who was at, who was successfully
00:56:18.920
lobbying you for a $15 million grant. It's right in the criminal code. It's, I think it's one section
00:56:24.580
122. It's a, it's a criminal offense. Um, but the RCMP didn't pursue it. Uh, and, and I think it's
00:56:31.820
for Justin, it's like, you know, he's the son of a former prime minister and he's youthful and bashful.
00:56:38.060
And there's something kind of, um, um, something that there's sort of a, uh, an, an instinct to
00:56:45.920
protect and forgive him among the political class that exists for no other political figure in this
00:56:51.380
country. Um, and, uh, you know, I think it would take an actual psychologist to do an examination of
00:56:57.740
how it is that, uh, the system has been so forgiving of the many, um, uh, uh, scandals and in some cases
00:57:07.540
crimes that he's committed. That's a really interesting, uh, perspective. I, now, now I want
00:57:13.280
to interview a psychologist and find out what, what's going on. I think so. I mean, there's
00:57:17.540
something there. There's something there. Yeah, there is. Well, I, I do want to ask you a little
00:57:21.560
bit about the 2019 election and the new conservative leader, Aaron O'Toole. So, you know,
00:57:27.560
to me, the conservatives won the 2019 election. You guys got the popular vote. You increase your
00:57:33.180
vote count, your seats in, in every region. Uh, Andrew Scheer did a hell of a job standing up to
00:57:38.020
a media that was pretty biased against him. Um, but the sort of consensus in the media was that the
00:57:44.080
conservatives lost and that Andrew Scheer needed to go. And he sort of agreed with that and stepped
00:57:48.160
down. Uh, from your perspective, why, why do you think that Justin Trudeau got reelected and why
00:57:54.300
do you think the conservatives failed to ultimately really sort of win in terms of at least getting a
00:57:58.840
minority government? Well, you, you, you, you're quite right. The, I think Andrew Scheer deserves a
00:58:04.500
lot of credit for the successes you enumerated when he became leader. No one gave us a hope of even,
00:58:09.740
uh, reducing Trudeau to a minority. There was a talk that he would have the biggest majority ever
00:58:14.900
after the longest honeymoon ever, uh, of any prime minister. Look, he got 33% of the vote. It's the
00:58:22.860
lowest share of the vote of any prime minister in Canadian history. Um, uh, many prime ministers
00:58:28.840
have been defeated with, by getting a larger share of the vote than he got winning it. Um, so, um, he
00:58:35.940
had an incredibly efficient distribution of votes. I don't think any party in Canadian history has
00:58:43.220
gotten so many seats with so few votes. Um, and I don't say that, you know, as an excuse, it's
00:58:49.100
obviously a tribute in part to their strategy and how they have allocated the resources. But, you know,
00:58:56.100
this is not a popular prime minister, uh, and he can, he, he returns to office with an extremely weak
00:59:02.080
mandate. Um, and, but that said, uh, no majority prime minister had been defeated after just one term,
00:59:10.560
uh, since RB Bennett in the middle of the great depression. So history, uh, the math, the media,
00:59:17.240
and a whole series of other things were against Mr. Scheer at the time. Uh, and, um, I wish we had
00:59:23.780
done better as does he, but I think we can take solace in the fact that we didn't reduce them to a
00:59:28.940
minority and hopefully we can put an end to the government before they do too much damage.
00:59:34.220
So, uh, Aaron Atul is out to a really good start. I would say he's come out strong. Um, I would
00:59:40.080
argue that he's probably not as conservative as Andrew Scheer in terms of his social views, but
00:59:44.600
he seems like he really has hit a populist note. And we saw that with his Labor Day message and his
00:59:50.520
new Canada first economic strategy. So I was wondering if you could describe the ways that
00:59:55.620
you think that Aaron Atul is, is different than Andrew Scheer and, and how the sort of strategy would
01:00:00.920
be for Aaron Atul to become the next prime minister.
01:00:03.260
Well, I think, uh, Aaron has a lot of strong attributes. He's a veteran, a businessman. Um,
01:00:11.660
he has strong roots in the parts of the country. We need to win in order to form a majority government.
01:00:17.900
I think you're, you're right. He has struck the right tone. Um, I've always believed that the free
01:00:23.460
market, uh, is the best way to serve the working class and the poor. Uh, and, uh, by contrast,
01:00:31.460
what we have is government controlled corporatism that enriches those who have the most political
01:00:37.080
influence at the expense of everyone else. Um, we, we can campaign against that. And I think it
01:00:42.600
will be very popular and yes, populist to do so. Um, so I, I agree with you. I think he's off to a
01:00:48.060
good start and if he can continue with that momentum, uh, he'll be the next prime minister.
01:00:54.000
One of the interesting things we're seeing again, speculation with this throne speech,
01:00:58.540
but the idea that the liberals have moved so far to the left that the NDP doesn't really have a
01:01:03.220
place anymore. And you see Jagmeet Singh, I mean, he was the real loser in the 2019 election. They
01:01:09.020
just got decimated in Quebec and, uh, reduced in, in British Columbia and, and a lot of other
01:01:14.280
strongholds. It feels like there's not really a lot of room on the political spectrum for, for
01:01:19.460
seeing at this point. And then you have Aaron O'Toole sort of putting forth this Canada first
01:01:24.440
strategy. And, and, and when I say populist, I mean, sort of speaking more to working Canadians,
01:01:31.200
blue collar Canadians and people that might traditionally be part of that NDP voting based
01:01:36.420
union members and that kind of thing. Uh, do you think that that is part of the conservative
01:01:41.120
strategy is to, is to, to capture some of those voters that may feel, uh, not represented by a sort
01:01:48.360
of cosmopolitan environmentalist, uh, NDP movement? Yes. And that has been a problem for the NDP for a
01:01:56.520
long time now. You'll recall that the NDP used to be very strong in Saskatchewan, in, uh, rural British
01:02:05.280
Columbia, uh, in parts of Manitoba. Um, and they lost that because they became an ultra urban, uh, white
01:02:16.860
collar elite, um, socialist party faculty club, socialist party. Um, and they forgot about working
01:02:25.460
class people and farmers. Um, and so where, where the roots of the party were among farmers and workers,
01:02:31.360
they're now among activists and, um, loud mouths and protesters and people who, who get paid to go
01:02:40.780
around screaming and hollering and smashing things, uh, and theorizing all day. And that's not,
01:02:46.620
particularly a big market to pursue. And that's why I think you see more and more working class
01:02:52.100
people are attracted to the conservative message. Uh, and, uh, we're winning, we win in places like
01:02:58.220
Oshawa and in, um, rural Saskatchewan and, um, in the North in Northern, um, Northern Ontario. Uh,
01:03:08.260
so a lot of mining towns and assembly line constituencies where that you, the NDP used
01:03:15.420
to take for granted are now becoming conservative because they see us representing their working
01:03:20.300
class family values. Interesting. So do you have any, any predictions for the fall? It's going to be an
01:03:27.400
interesting time with, uh, thrown speech potentially going into an election and, and sort of more uncovering
01:03:34.400
things from your committee, the finance committee with the, we scandal, any, any predictions for the
01:03:38.620
fall here? Yeah, I, I think Trudeau is going to do as much, do anything he can to get an election.
01:03:45.440
If, uh, he can't get the proposition parties to vote down his speech from the throne, uh, or his fall
01:03:51.660
update, then he might just go to the governor general and say, I'm calling an election. The challenge
01:03:57.800
for him will be that people will say, okay, why are you calling an election? If you've passed your throne
01:04:04.020
speech, you passed your update, you passed all of your COVID spending, what would a majority give you
01:04:09.740
that you don't already have? And of course, the only answer is it would allow him to lock in power
01:04:15.820
before people find out how broke we are and before the scandals become fully public. Uh, and that's not a
01:04:21.960
very good justification to ask people for a majority. Uh, you know, please give me a majority so I can cover up
01:04:27.800
scandals, liberal scandals. Um, uh, I, it doesn't sound like much of a slogan. So I think he's in a,
01:04:35.320
he's in a bind. Uh, and, uh, the only thing that can help him is if Jagmeet Singh really jumps in and
01:04:40.840
tries to defeat him, which would be irrational for the NDP. And we know that might be the reason they
01:04:46.940
do it. Interesting. And then just final question for you here. What do you think the biggest challenge
01:04:52.040
for conservatives is, conservatives are in this country and in bringing down this Trudeau
01:04:57.580
government? Well, I think the biggest challenge is telling people the warning. It's not a fun job,
01:05:06.640
but warning people about the fiscal catastrophe that's coming and being, uh, you know, sounding
01:05:13.260
that alarm before everyone realizes there's a fire. Um, you know, and people say, well, why are you
01:05:19.520
pulling the alarm? Well, it's because there's a fire. Well, we don't see the fire yet. Well, believe me,
01:05:24.640
it's there and it's coming and you're going to see smoke and flames very soon. And so we have to
01:05:30.160
be, you know, the bad guys who come and explain that things cost money and that we're eventually
01:05:35.460
going to run out of it. Um, that is a very difficult job to play at some point when we've
01:05:40.500
indicated and everyone will say, Oh, they were right all along. But by then it's too late. The
01:05:45.600
damage is already done. So that is the biggest challenge, but you know, we have to be happy
01:05:50.200
warriors and get out there and make the case. It's the right thing to do and the country will
01:05:54.360
be better off for us doing it. Well, you, uh, you certainly have your work cut out for you,
01:05:59.040
especially considering, you know, all the things we talked about, how the sort of media adoring
01:06:04.920
Justin Trudeau and seeing that he can do no wrong and the sort of liberal stronghold that exists in
01:06:10.100
Ottawa. But Pia, we really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining
01:06:14.480
all of these concepts to us and help breaking down, uh, everything from an insider perspective.
01:06:19.400
We really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining the true north, uh, speaker
01:06:22.740
series. Great to be with you. Thank you so much.